Womens Studies Quarterly

Special twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the leading journal in women's studies.

From an interview with the wrongly-accused Betty Tyson to an analysis of "Prime Suspect 2," this issue explores the increasing visibility of women--as offenders, victims, and criminal justice professionals--in the field of criminal justices studies. Topics include mandatory sentencing laws, the war on drugs, the motivations of Andrea Yates, and the then-recent HIV epidemic facing incarcerated women. Creative works and resources for teaching and learning more about women and crime are included.

“A sharp and compelling memoir” of a feminist icon who forged positive change for herself, for women everywhere, and for the world (Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association). Florence Howe has led an audacious life: she created a freedom school during the civil rights movement, refused to bow to academic heavyweights who were opposed to sharing power with women, established women’s studies programs across the country during the early years of the second wave of the feminist movement, and founded a feminist publishing house at a time when books for and about women were a rarity. Sustained by her relationships with iconic writers like Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Marilyn French, Howe traveled the world as an emissary for women’s empowerment, never ceasing in her personal struggle for parity and absolute freedom for all women. Howe’s “long-awaited memoir” spans her ninety years of personal struggle and professional triumphs in “a tale told with startling honesty by one of the founding figures of the US feminist movement, giving us the treasures of a history that might otherwise have been lost” (Meena Alexander, author of Fault Lines).

   This WSQ contains an updated look at the issues raised by efforts at instituional and curricular change that include initiatives to alter the composition of the student body, faculty, support staff, administration, and governing boards and to transform policies and curricula to more strongly reflect the composition of the populations they serve.

By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange. This pairing enables personal modes of writing and engagement with globalization debates and forges a definition of justice keyed to the specificity of time, place, and feeling. Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the contributors participate in a long-standing feminist tradition of upending spatial hierarchies and making theory out of the practices of everyday life.

This issue is of WSQ is about writing and reading, a celebration of twenty years of feminist publishing and some of the books, scholarships, and people that have made a difference.

Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies re-examines the field’s foundational assumptions by identifying and critically analyzing eighteen of its key terms. Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women’s and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women’s and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Pioneers in the field of transgender studies identify cutting-edge feminist work.